Even at the last minute, there was a deal on the table for Elizabeth Johnson from the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office: Tell us where Baby Gabriel is, and we’ll recommend a sentence of time served.

Johnson did not respond to the offer. Instead, she was sentenced to 5.25 years in prison, with credit for the nearly three years she has already been in jail.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Kreamer also sentenced Johnson to four years of probation. With good behavior, she could be released in two years and three months.

But the baby is still missing.

Gabriel disappeared in December 2009 when he was 8months old. Johnson first told the baby’s father, Logan McQueary, that she had killed him and dumped his body in the trash. Then she told police that she had given him to a couple in a park in San Antonio.

She stuck to that story on Friday in Maricopa County Superior Court.

“Though I would never want to harm Gabriel, I realize I did harm him by taking him away from Logan and giving him away in San Antonio,” she said.

Her maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather spoke on her behalf, as did her twin brother, Robert. They described a “train-wreck upbringing” by an alcoholic mother who left the twins on the grandmother’s doorstep. Johnson and her brother were orphaned at an early age and passed through as many as seven foster homes, they said.

Johnson’s family and her attorney, Marc Victor, theorized that Johnson gave the baby away rather than submit him to the kind of childhood she had experienced.

“She’s never seen a mom,” Victor said. “She doesn’t know what a mom is.”

Victor asked that Johnson be sentenced to probation on all counts.

Before Kreamer sentenced her, he said, “In those circumstances, it’s a wonder you got through it at all.”

Johnson, 26, wore jailhouse stripes and handcuffs linked to chains as she listened. Occasionally she sobbed, as when her grandmother described her mother’s drowning.

And when she faced Kreamer, she tried to explain her actions and finally said, “Regardless of my side, it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, Gabriel is still missing.

“I do deserve the maximum, I do,” she blurted out.

When he addressed the court, McQueary said, “She should stay in jail until Gabriel is found or serve the maximum sentence.”

Kreamer explained that he could not jail Johnson until she revealed Gabriel’s whereabouts. Nor did he give her the maximum 9.5 years that she faced. He cited the great harm done to McQueary and his family and sentenced her to consecutive sentences of 3.5 years for custodial interference and 1.75 years for unlawful imprisonment. Then he imposed a four-year “probation tail.”

In December 2009, Johnson was involved in a custody dispute with McQueary. She had tried to give the child up for adoption to a local woman, Tammi Smith, but McQueary fought it.

Then, according to police and trial testimony, on Dec. 18, 2009, Johnson took Gabriel and drove to San Antonio to avoid shared custody with McQueary. Two days later, a Maricopa County judge awarded custody to McQueary, but Johnson and the baby were gone.

That day, Johnson checked into a hotel, and witnesses in depositions claimed she had the baby with her. Prosecutors also used photos Johnson had taken of Gabriel to prove that he was still alive and with her over the next several days.

But on Dec. 27, 2009, Johnson was seen without the baby while boarding a bus for Florida. That same day, she sent text messages to McQueary saying she had killed the child.

“I suffocated him. I covered him up with a towel, and I suffocated him, and he turned blue, and I put him in his diaper bag, and I put him in the trash can,” she said when McQueary reached her on her phone.

When Johnson was arrested in Miami, she claimed not to know where the baby was. She told police she had given him to a couple she had met at a park in San Antonio, but she was never able to provide names or descriptions of the couple.

She was charged in Maricopa County with kidnapping, custodial interference and conspiracy to commit custodial interference. She was not charged with murder, because if she had killed Gabriel, it would have occurred in another jurisdiction, namely Texas. The child has never been found, and though presumed dead, the murder investigation was muddied by a San Antonio detective who improperly found his way into Johnson’s jail cell and extracted statements from Johnson outside the presence of her attorneys.

That incident compromised Johnson’s relationship with her attorneys, and she fired several before settling with Victor. Johnson also underwent a court-ordered psychological evaluation to determine if she was competent to stand trial.

The trial began Sept. 20. Victor presented little in the way of defense, rarely cross examining the prosecution’s witnesses. Yet, when the jurors came back from deliberation they found Johnson guilty of unlawful imprisonment, custodial interference and conspiracy to commit custodial interference. Had she been convicted of kidnapping, she could have faced 27.5 years in prison.

In July, Tammi Smith was sentenced to 30 days in jail and three years’ probation on counts of forgery and conspiracy to commit custodial interference. She was in court on Friday morning for a probation review hearing.

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